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Painting Series Using Hubble Images & Geometry (20+paintings)

My “Perspectives” series deals with different ways of seeing things. We have only lived our own experiences and see the world through our own tuned lenses tailored with our individual brains. Sometimes that makes it difficult to see something from another point of view.

The series starts simply with a few paintings of images from the Hubble telescope, then I begin to slice up and manipulate more images I found in the NASA gallery. First it’s stripes, then to triangles, pyramids, tetrahedrons, an octahedron, an icosahedron, and even a stellated dodecahedron. I take an element from the previous painting and explore it in a different way in the next, and sometimes each of those take in another direction and often gain in complexity. Sometimes I would make a smaller piece larger, sometimes I rework the same shape, or maybe I use a specific technique in another way. I’d change the same reference into multiple hues, or overlay images. Some have dead ends and I jump around a bit, but the last painting could not exist without every painting between. In doing so, I hope to reveal a bit about how I try to see beyond my own perspective to better understand others but to also show a bit about my creative process of pushing ideas. Preceding the title is a number which represents its order in the series followed by the name of the subject of my reference. The last piece of the series also integrates my own image of Rocky Mountain National Park to introduce a bit of my own perspective and its title reflects that.

With all these, I attempt to add some kind of illusory effect because things aren’t always as they seem. Besides my use of color to create vibrancy, there are several pieces in the series that can be looked at in multiple ways. For example, the shape may appear two-dimensional in one instance, but in another glance it has a three-dimensional appearance. So many times I’ve been humbled in life because I am certain something is one way just to be proven that my senses and logic are not always right. If we are aware of our limited senses and awareness, it makes it easier to be open to see things from multiple perspectives. I often wonder if my viewers first see these pieces flat or more dimensional, or if the stars and space dust seem to be within or behind the geometry. Even literally at different angles some of these pieces can be seen in another way because they’re packed with metallic paints that have a changing sheen depending on where you’re looking from. A handful also have glitter that appear to have sparkling stars when they catch the light just right.

In all of this geometrical manipulation, I chose the cosmos as my reference because the idea of space brings the human race together. We are all in this with each other on our pale blue dot, and we have so much more in common that we do different because it. On a planet full of such strife as we continue to pack the surface, I think it’s more important than ever to try to be open and understanding.

I chose to share my favorite paintings that best represented my vision. To see the full series and the paintings still available, visit christiesnelson.com